I’m starting a new category called, “Walk Around the Block.” No, it is not the wonderful teacher’s training manual for integrating Built Environment Education into the classroom curriculum. It is an opportunity to walk around my block and see my neighborhood. I have been here a year and everyone’s pretty busy, but I do hope that some of you will come to visit me personally at 39th and Walnut. I’ll tell you more about my building later… but back to the introductions to my Missouri friends….

This is Henry Brown. He needs no introduction. His post is at the corner of 39th and Warwick. Long before now, I was confident that he had friends all over the city, from all walks of life. Any open-hearted person would be engaged by dapper Henry. He flashes a big smile, waves a friendly hello. If a new face has time to stop, he’s open to learning from a new soul. Some, as I, continue to get his time, attention, work and wisdom.

I’ll start with this picture of Henry & Emmett who also lives in this building. I intend to get you one of Emmett’s drawings in another post. Il et artiste extroadinaire et il habite dans la meme appartement avec Henri Brun. Emmet needs a kidney. I hope he is well when this post meets the blog. His drawings were in my kitchen at Hyde Park. They were intricate, fine, composed and came from nothing formal but a relationship to a power within himself to create.

I may be moving from here in the future. I did check out their rent vs. mine in the Illinois and I would like to stay in the neighborhood. It might not be what is in my cards. My Grandmother lived to be 97 and that’s 45 more years of rent in Missouri with all of it’s color and joy, bright lights, screams, brown paper bags of 39th and Main.

I’m probably heading for the burbs, back to Kansas… where the great big sunflowers grow. Hoping that past might give me a future for I really have nothing to contribute here, politics and people where I have yet to find place, no history except a past of 30 years ago forgotten. I need to go where I have roots, where I built something, contributed to a place, before I forget that it mattered, that I mattered.

I hope my friends will stay with me. I know Henry Brown’s words will stay with me. Stay tuned.